LOOKS LIKE BUSH FOUND A SOULMATE IN BRITISH HOME SECRETARY JOHN REID. JUST HOW REAL WAS THAT BIG PLANE BLOWING UP TERROR THREAT?

As I've mentioned before I used to work in the record business. As I was preparing to retire, our U.K. company hired a fellow I never got to know, John Reid. This week, with all this terrorism business and all the planes Blair helped Bush prevent being blown up, I find out that John Reid is the Home Secretary. Turns out it's a different John Reid. And although I never heard of him, other people have. I've been seeing him on the TV. Not counting The Daily Show, and the occasional episode of South Park and Reno 911, I watch about 4 minutes of TV a day. But I've seen plenty of this Reid character. I can't say I liked him much. But I didn't necessarily hate him either-- until this afternoon. I was driving and he was making a speech and it was on NPR. He was calling for people to voluntarily, cheerfully give up their civil liberties in the face of contemporary terrorism. I was really stunned. Has this guy been watching V For Vendetta a few too many times? Perhaps not.

I started doing some research on who exactly the U.K.'s version of Alberto Gonzales is. And, believe me, he's a nasty piece of work. The deeper I delve, the nastier and nastier he looks. Even the bland Wikipedia entry gives one cause for pause. A former hard core Communist, Reid, who seems to have ambitions to replace Blair, is a bit of an total authoritarian, described on the BBC as "an all purpose attack dog" who "came out snarling and spent less time promoting labour policy than trying to put the opposition in to intensive care."

On March 2, 2002 The Guardian, Britain's most respected newspaper, printed this about Reid:

In the international arena, Reid, during his drinking days, fell into bad company in the Balkans with the Bosnian Serb mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending three days in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic. "He used to talk to Karadzic, he admired Karadzic. He mistook the Bosnian Serb project as the inheritor of the united Communist ideal," says Brendan Simms, a Cambridge academic and author of Unfinest Hour: Britain And The Destruction of Bosnia.

OK, no one is perfect and we all have pasts.

It gets much worse. I tracked down the weblog of British author, the U.K.'s former ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray is no admirer of Reid's and he seems to think this whole terror alert was very possibly a bunch of baloney cooked up between Blair, Bush and Reid. He offers his version of what this was really all about.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year-- like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes-- which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11." The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shoveled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.

For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling University he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer," (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect-- a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity-- that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offense the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical.

Well, I certainly am. I mean I was before. Even one of the CNN talking heads referred to it as "an alleged terrorist threat." Do they just want us to stop flying and traveling? Is this how Bush, the world's biggest terrorist, is going to use his favorite weapon to scare Americans into voting away their liberties once and for all by re-electing Republicans in November? William Greider seems to think so. James K. Galbraith doesn't seem to be buying in to the official version of this tale either. Eek a mouse; I wonder if I can move back to Holland. Meanwhile, a majority of Britons say they don't want their country following Bush's lead in foreign policy. And 80% want Tony Blair to split from Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror," or work more closely with Europe.